And the story of another Knoxville Hootenanny, the strangest concert of 1964 This month, our friends at the East Tennessee Historical Society are hosting a first-ever History Hootenanny. The word has a down-homey feel, which makes it a little surprising […]

The Scourge of the Snap-Shot People You may know that we have an ongoing project called “Knoxville Shoebox,” which is a slowly growing collection of personal photographs of historical value. Despite some major important collections of historic photographs, it’s surprising […]

Some thoughts about the new book about Frances Hodgson Burnett: Are we keeping our garden too secret? It’s gardening season, of course, and in local libraries and bookstores there’s a popular gift book called Unearthing the Secret Garden: The Plants and […]

So what’s Knoxville’s oldest restaurant Now? Some years ago, soon after the final closing of the venerable Regas Restaurant, I wrote a column in Metro Pulse pondering the question of what might be its successor as Knoxville’s Oldest. With something […]

Part of the lore of the 1982 World’s Fair, then and now, was that little ol’ Knoxville had the gumption, or arrogance, or naivete, to put on a world’s fair. The Wall Street Journal’s “scruffy little city” moniker, casting doubts on […]

There are some names you see in Knoxville that you don’t see as much in other cities. The name Cansler is one. In Mechanicsville, there’s a Cansler Street, and on University Avenue, a Cansler Building. Off Western is the old […]

The Evolution of Our Oddest Holiday   I had a much more serious subject in mind for this month’s column, but couldn’t find the data I needed in time to complete it. To make a serious point, you need to […]

Some people and things you might have seen one century ago, at Christmastime   It had been a dramatic year, one that had seen perhaps the only racially prompted lynch-mob riot in American history in which the only people injured […]

The doctors and patient who pioneered a new surgery on Gay Street If you browse around 19th-century graveyards as much as we do, and do some quick math, you’ll find an alarming number of untimely deaths of young married women. […]